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Medical heretics

By Robert Matthews

MARION SELFE vividly remembers the day her body launched its attack upon
itself. “It happened literally overnight,” she recalls. “I woke up paralysed and
in terrible pain. All my joints felt like they had hot needles in them.” At
first she thought she had fallen victim to a bizarre disease caught during her
recent trip to Australia. The truth was less exotic but no less appalling. Selfe
had developed rheumatoid arthritis, a crippling and incurable condition that
affects 650,000 people in Britain alone. She was just 25.

Doctors were unable to give Selfe anything beyond painkillers, and a warning.
“They told me that if I didn’t keep my joints moving, I’d end up in a
wheelchair—which really scared me,” she says. Today, 35 years later, she
has managed to avoid that fate, though she has lost the use of her wrists and an
elbow. Yet over all those years Selfe, like many other people with rheumatoid
arthritis, has clung to the hope that one day someone might find a cure. Perhaps
that day has come.

Two rheumatologists think they have finally unlocked the mystery of this
baffling disease. But the medical establishment first stonewalled, then
pilloried their radical new theory. Despite this, Jonathan Edwards and Geraldine
Cambridge from University College, London, claim to have the first evidence that
a safe and effective cure for rheumatoid arthritis may finally be in sight. They
have already had some success with a small number of patients, and are convinced
they can repeat this.

Why would the body’s immune system turn traitor, attacking the lining of the
joints? This …